Examining the Newest Historical Research on Islam and the Earliest Quranic Manuscripts - Jay Smith

Published on Dec 22, 2016

With so much of the world focused on ISIS these days, a group which uses and is absolutely dependent on the Qur'an and their prophet Muhammad for their authority, it is important to look at just how authoritative they both are historically. I will look at the newest data we have on Muhammad, as well as the Qur'anic manuscript evidence, including a look at the 6 earliest Manuscripts, and the new Qur'anic folios which are being dated using Carbon 14 dating (including the Birmingham folios highlighted by BBC in July 2015), which suggest that Qur'anic Suras are not only older than the Qur'an, but older than Muhammad and Islam as well! I will compare these with our Biblical material to show just how much more historical evidence we have for our Bible and Jesus Christ, than exists for their Qur'an and Muhammad.

Thanks very much, pr. For once, I sat through a long video straight way!For anyone in a hurry, there's nothing much new before about 40mins in, apart from a bit more about Petra than I'd seen before. The good stuff starts at about 45mins and gets hot at about 1 hour. Preaching begins at 1hr 4mins.Want to save even more time?:

Spoiler! :

New information is that the famous Tokapi, Samarkand etc mss have finally been examined by (Muslim) experts and been found to be more recent than claimed and to have numerous alterations. The really new stuff is that several Saana "Koranic" fragments have been repeatedly radiocarbon dated by multiple labs and may well be pre-Koranic. He suggests that they are some of the sources from which the Koran was borrowed. He says that at the time of the video (uploaded 22 Dec 2016) these datings were unpublished.

‘Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions. They neither intermarry nor eat together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

I will look at the newest data we have on Muhammad, as well as the Qur'anic manuscript evidence, including a look at the 6 earliest Manuscripts, and the new Qur'anic folios which are being dated using Carbon 14 dating (including the Birmingham folios highlighted by BBC in July 2015), which suggest that Qur'anic Suras are not only older than the Qur'an, but older than Muhammad and Islam as well!

Jay Smith has updated his material after Elizabeth Puin (wife of Gerd Puin) published her latest research.

The 6 Earliest Manuscripts of the Qur’an, Topkapi, Samarkand, Ma’il, Petropolitanus, Husseini, Sana’a (upper text) all date from the 8th or even the 9th centuries, are incomplete, do not match with other early versions and none of them agree completely with the 1924 Hafs canocial text used today.

1. Sana'a manuscriptsBy far the most interesting manuscript is that of Sana'a, found in 1975. This manuscript or Palimpsest has two layers: a lower text that was erased, rubbed out, corrected or overwritten between 671 and 705 AD for a new version. The lower layer, which has only 63 verses, has 70 differences with any known variant of the 9th century and the upper text has further variants. The lower text is believed to have been written sometime between 632-669 CE, as the parchment of the Stanford folio has been radiocarbon dated with 95% accuracy to before 669 CE, and 75% probability from before 646 CE.

2. Carbon dating reports on the Sana'a collectionCarbon Dating research which was carried out on 9 separate folios of the Sana’a collections by at 4 different laboratories, including Lyon (France), Kiel (Germany), Zürich (Switzerland), and Oxford (England).

The RC14 dating of the Sana’a A, B, C, D and Birmingham folios suggest that these texts are much earlier than was previously considered. All folios )parchment) predate the official codification of the Quran (652) by either years or centuries.

Conclusions:1) The 2 Layers of the Sana’a ms prove that men created a nascent Qur’an in the 7th century2) The 4 Carbon dated Lab reports prove that men borrowed stories created long before the Qur’an

With the work of Elizabeth Puin (tracking of textual changes) it may be possible to relate the lower text of the Sana'a manuscript to older sources that describe a "great unjust" done in the area of Sana'a preceding the birth of Muhammad. After all, the carbon dating reports on the Sana'a collection tell us that the parchments used are much older (centuries older) than those of for instance Topkapi and Samarkand.

The sources used for the Quran imply that originally a Yemenite story was used. So what was this great unjust and how did it connect to Muhammad?

All Abrahamic religions derive from Petra. Or if you prefer, Zion. Or Mecca for that matter! After all, what's in a name? (no not taken from Shakespeare)

Thanks, takeiteasynow.One excuse made to get round radiocarbon datings of parchment is that the material was for some reason stashed away for ages before anyone got round to writing on it. Has there been any academic debunking of this argument?

‘Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions. They neither intermarry nor eat together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

One excuse made to get round radiocarbon datings of parchment is that the material was for some reason stashed away for ages before anyone got round to writing on it. Has there been any academic debunking of this argument?

Not that I know of. In his updated presentation from May 2018 Jay Smith argues that parchments were too costly to be stashed away.

All Abrahamic religions derive from Petra. Or if you prefer, Zion. Or Mecca for that matter! After all, what's in a name? (no not taken from Shakespeare)

Yes, I've seen that argument. ISTR Ibn Rushd knows quite a lot about the history of parchment and papyrus, but it's too late at the moment for me to search her posts to see if there's anything about that aspect.

‘Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions. They neither intermarry nor eat together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Actually you can also learn a lot of what is written on these papyri:)

This book of Petra Sijpesteijn, Shaping a Muslim State: the World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official, reveals more on how early Muslims or Saracens used papyri but its content is even far more revealing. This book is an accessible history of the formation of Islam and the first hundred years of Muslim rule in Egypt and and centers around a corpus of previously unknown Arabic papyrus letters, dating from between AD 730 and 750. I have researched this book to find more proof for Dan Gibson's Qibla theory but (as always) got unexpected results.

2) makes me wonder if Egypt was even part of this empire during the first 50 years of "Islamic reign". The ground plans of early 'mosques', for instance from Fusta, were directed towards Hegra. Arab forces asked Umar permission for the conquest of Egypt as it is was undefended.The name Umar is only attested in inscriptions around Hegra, apparently the leader of regional tribal alliance.

3) lacks any proof for a centralized religious authority, practice, tradition or protocol that provided instructions on how to build mosques or the direction of prayer.

As a consequence Dan Gibson's theory can only be attested and validated in the heartlands of Syria, confirmed by the change of the qibla in open mosques, Negev desert.

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All Abrahamic religions derive from Petra. Or if you prefer, Zion. Or Mecca for that matter! After all, what's in a name? (no not taken from Shakespeare)